Summer Therapy Programs at the School of Health Professions

• By School of Health Professions
• August 6, 2024
• Campus Life

Since its inception, many programs within the School of Health Professions have committed to providing students with the clinical foundations needed to provide services to diverse populations in the West Texas area and beyond. That commitment shines through in the numerous summer programs offered by the school’s Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, many in partnership with the Doctor of Occupational Therapy program in the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, which aim to meet the various needs of those in the Lubbock area.

The summer programs offered include Chatty Champions, Tech Tykes, Tech Tasters, the Stroke & Aphasia Recovery (STAR) Summer Arts Program, and the TTUHSC Literacy Group, which serve many different ages and needs among Lubbock residents.

TECH TYKES

Tech Tykes uses fun, hands-on activities to build social skills and improve speech and language skills in children aged three to six, serving 30 children each year. Tech Tykes Director and Program Director of the Bachelor of Science in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences program Brittany Hall, Ph.D, CCC-SLP, LSLS Cert. AVT, has a two-decade history with speech and language summer therapy programs, a commitment that began during her graduate studies at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. She emphasizes the importance of creating a fun environment for both the children in the program and the student clinicians.

“If you are not having fun, we are doing it wrong,” Hall says. “We are always thinking about ways to make activities more hands-on, exciting, and, lots of times, messy. If something is too messy at home, we are happy to do it here.”

The Tech Tykes program includes approximately 50 total student clinicians each year from the Master of Science in Speech-Language Pathology (SLP), Doctor of Occupational Therapy (OTD), and Bachelor of Science in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences (SLHS) programs that learn to collaborate in this active setting The program aims to take a holistic approach, with SLP and SLHS students thinking primarily about speech, language, and communication, while Hall says OTD students are also looking to support developmental skills and working to enhance engagement in a variety of activities. It has been a learning process with growing pains for the students, but it has produced results in how the program approaches the children it serves.

"We have been able to develop better activities and better programming because we work together,” Hall said. “When we value the input of other professions, and you take a holistic viewpoint, it just makes the process and the progress better for the kids, which is our end goal. We want to help the students understand that there is a better way to provide treatment for young kids when you work together simultaneously rather than separately.”

The collaboration begins in the weeks leading up to the summer program, as SLP, OT, and SLHS students sit down and map out individualized goals for each child through their respective lenses. From there, the student clinicians meet to discuss the progress they would like to see from each child before working together to develop activities that best suit those goals in the program’s group setting.

A program prioritizing fun needs a fun place to call home, and this summer marks Tech Tykes’ third year at the Science Spectrum, which has further enhanced the program experience for both the children and student clinicians.

"The Science Spectrum has been an incredible partner for our summer programs," Hall expressed gratitude. "Their live demonstrations and animal encounters offer our kids an up-close look at the fascinating world of reptiles, turtles, snakes, and more—a quintessential Science Spectrum experience.

“It has been a fantastic partnership for us. It not only provides invaluable experiences for our students but also equips them with practical skills for their future careers. The Science Spectrum is an exceptional resource for learning how to leverage community assets in a clinical setting.”

The collaboration between SLP and OT students, paired with an outstanding venue in the Science Spectrum, has allowed the program to create the best possible environment for connection and development for the children it serves. Hall noted that the program serves as a valuable alternative to traditional summer programming, which might not be accessible to all children. "We're thrilled to be a source of summer fun and enrichment for these kids," she added.

“While it can be difficult for some of these children to separate from their caregivers, they quickly become enthusiastic participants," Hall explained. "The children form strong bonds within their groups and demonstrate noticeable improvements in language, play, and engagement by the end of the program. These outcomes align perfectly with our goals.”

CHATTY CHAMPIONS

In the Chatty Champions program, SLP and OT students aim to enhance intelligibility in children with diagnoses related to speech sound disorders, including apraxia and articulation and phonology disorders. The two-week program serves 16 children per session, ages four to seven. Children will often graduate up to Chatty Champions from the Tech Tykes program.

“Chatty Champions focuses specifically on the 'speech' part of speech therapy, helping young children work on sounds to enhance their communication and literacy skills,” says Hesper Holland, Ph.D., CCC-SLP. Holland leads the Chatty Champions program and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences. “Each session begins with basic sounds or ‘sounds of the day’, and then we work up to using those sounds correctly to say words and eventually to pre-reading skills like sounding out words.”

The program includes a 30-minute smaller focus treatment group session of three to four children who are divided by age and sounds they need to work on. This time focuses on the individual child’s therapy goals and specific skills they need to work on. Following the focused treatment time, children also participate in a larger group session where they work on broader speech and phonological awareness skills.

“Each session is built around a hierarchy,” Holland says. “We start at the sound level. Each day has a theme sound class. If it is windy sounds, those are S's and F’s. The first part of the day is focused on how to make those sounds with their mouth, and they practice using their bodies to ‘be the sound’. For /s/, they would move their bodies like a snake and make the /s/ sound. The next activities would focus on sounds in words, then phrases, and eventually in conversation. Then, they will play motor-based games, sing songs, read a story, and complete craft activities all with the sound of the day embedded into every task.”

Much like the Tech Tykes program, Chatty Champions is sometimes used as a substitute for traditional summer camps or summer school. While the program produces excellent results, the kids don’t always realize they’re learning.

“The kids love it,” Holland says. “It's really fun, they're engaged in activities and games without realizing they're drilling specific sounds thousands of times a day. We aim for 2,000 to 3,000 productions during the 2 hours they are with us, and they achieve them without feeling like it's work."

Student clinicians working with the program include undergraduate students in the Bachelor of Science in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences program and graduate students in the Master of Science in Speech-Language Pathology program who are getting their first clinical placement experience. Similar to the Tech Tykes program and other summer therapy programs, second-year students from the Doctor of Occupational Therapy program are involved and build motor and sensory into the activities they select for therapy.

“The undergraduate students are working towards getting experience hours to be SLP assistants,” Holland says. “This is the last piece that they need to be able to get their SLP assistant license and get a job. The group therapy experience emulates what they would do in the real world.

“The SLP graduate students are in their first semester and are just learning about treatment for speech sound disorder. They also get a lot of experience working with occupational therapy and understanding how our two scopes of practice overlap.”

TECH TASTERS

A feeding group serving ages two and up, Tech Tasters uses activities such as gross and fine motor sensory tasks, positive food exploration, and oral motor feeding exercises to help children with feeding aversion or oral-motor feeding difficulties. Tech Tasters is in its 11th year and includes five to 12 children per summer.

Each child in the program has unique needs, with many experiencing a restricted diet or difficulty chewing. Program Director and Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Speech, Language, & Hearing Sciences Sarai Granados, MS, CCC-SLP, says that to identify those needs, she will spend time with the child and their family before the program if they are not already part of her caseload throughout the year. When the summer group starts, the children participate in individual and group activities with the SLP and OT student clinicians.

“In terms of the group task, we do some whole-body warmups, fine motor and gross motor activities with occupational therapy, and then as a group, the kids also engage in what we call child-led food exploration, which just offers them the opportunity to interact with food and explore food in a fun way,” Granados said. “Either they do a recipe together or they do a food craft, but there's no pressure to eat. It’s just doing something fun with food.”

Aside from the group activity, children will spend individualized time with SLP and OT students who work together to address their specific goals, whether it is improving their chewing skills, being more willing to interact with food, or taking in more food within a shorter amount of time.

The program also allows parents to watch their child’s session and offers a counseling and education session at the end of each group meeting, where they are given suggestions for more positive mealtime interaction at home.

“A lot of that is dealing with the stress that the family has behind the eating situations,” Granados says. “Parents are involved in every aspect as much as they're willing because feeding is an everyday thing. It's something that the more parents can carry over strategies into the home environment, the more successful progress we see.”

"The guidelines and the structure that we train the parents on is intended to decrease mealtime stress. The less stress the parent has which typically leads to an increase in appetite. Parents also say that the child is more willing to have food on their plate that they wouldn't normally eat and start to taste food they wouldn't have before. That all correlates to more positive meal times.”

While the program has helped Lubbock-area families ease some of the stresses around mealtimes with their children, working with the program has helped SLP and OT student clinicians gain experience working in an area of their field that Granados says is harder to find training in. She says this can help them after they graduate and hit the job market.

“There's not a lot of direct training on feeding theory,” Granados says. “It is a unique area of both fields, so our students here at TTUHSC have this opportunity to learn about something that most students freshly out of school don't have much hands-on experience in. That can help set them apart from many other newer graduate students.”

TTUHSC LITERACY GROUP

In addition to her work with Tech Tasters, Granados also leads the TTUHSC Literacy Group. Although TTUHSC has offered similar reading programs in the past, the group is in its first year in its current iteration. It targets various skills in children that are needed for academic growth and achievement. This year, the program is serving 12 children, which are divided into two groups based on age.

"Our younger group is still at the age where they are learning to read, so they work on making the correspondence between letters, the sounds that those letters make, recognizing words, and sounding out words,” Granados says. They also work on listening to stories and being able to retell them. Those are just some of the skills that they need to be able to learn to read.”

“And then we have our older kids,” Granados says. “Those are reading to learn kids, meaning it's assumed that they already know how to read, but we want them to be able to take what they're reading and maximize what they're taking in. We focus on making sure they understand all the words in the text, so we work on building their vocabulary and train them from a broader standpoint: see the text and be able to take meaning from it. For example, what are the characters thinking, and what might happen next? That builds their ability to learn from text.”

With different age groups and various skill levels among the children in the program, Granados says the goal is to meet each child where they are individually and build their skills through different activities each week. While the younger group is working on the ground-level basics, the older group is going through a chapter book together from week to week.

“There are some kids that are coming in with actual reading difficulties, and there are other kids that want reading enrichment—their parents want them to maintain their skills and potentially build on that.,” says Granados. “I have two main rules for our student clinicians: make it fun and make it safe educationally for the kids, especially for those struggling because learning for them doesn’t always feel safe. We want them to feel like when they come to us, it's an educationally safe place to make mistakes, learn from their mistakes, and build enthusiasm for reading.

The program includes eight graduate SLP student clinicians who Granados says have the opportunity to see first-hand the difference in working with school-aged children compared to preschoolers, who they might work with in other programs. In addition to the opportunity to work with school-aged children, the program is similar to the experience in the Tech Tasters program in that the students can gain first-hand experience in a unique area of their field.

“Similar to feeding, students don't always get a lot of direct training on how to help with reading skills,” Granados says. “It's taught to us very indirectly because we know about oral language and reading, so with our knowledge of language and oral language, we can help with the written language which is essentially reading and writing.”

The group hopes that teaching children these skills early will jumpstart their learning now and later in life.

“The more the child can be successful in reading, the more they are going to be successful academically and in life because it is so important to how we access information,” Granados says. “So much of how we take information is via reading, and one very important way that we express ourselves is via writing.”

STAR SUMMER ARTS PROGRAM

The National Aphasia Association defines aphasia as a result of a stroke or brain injury that affects a person’s ability to communicate. Founded in 1998, the TTUHSC Stroke and Aphasia Recovery (STAR) Program aims to optimize communication capabilities and life participation for those affected by aphasia and other communication challenges, along with their families and care partners.

The traditional STAR Program meets weekly from September through May and includes about 55 people experiencing some type of aphasia and 25 of their care partners. These meetings take place with participants joining both in person and virtually.

“Our goals are to promote communication and to decrease social isolation because social isolation and depression are some of the worst impacts that aphasia has on a person's life and their family,” says Melinda Corwin, Ph.D. CCC-SLP, Director of the STAR Program and Assistant Director in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences.

June marks Aphasia Awareness Month, and in 2012, the STAR Program began holding the Summer Arts Program each June to help raise awareness and further engage its members. Although the program took a hybrid approach in 2021 due to COVID, the program is in-person and more intensive than the traditional STAR Program, taking place eight days over two weeks for three-and-a-half hours per day.

This year, the program included 21 members with aphasia who participated in drama/improvisation, choir, and art.

“The arts have been shown to promote health in a number of ways and also to decrease social isolation, so we think it's a very worthwhile and important part of the STAR Program,” Corwin says. “It's just very different.”

The program culminates with a final performance and art exhibit, where members can share the work they did over the course of their two weeks in the program with the public. The event, which draws over 200 people each year, includes an art exhibit as well as a final performance that includes drama/improv, and a choir concert.

“One of the things that we have found to be the most powerful is the esprit de corps, the feeling of being a part of a group,” says Corwin. “Also, displaying one's work publicly and being credited for it is a big deal. Even wearing t-shirts that say STAR Summer Arts Program unifies people so that they feel part of a collective, rather than socially isolated at home with no outlet for communication or social interaction.”

“One of our big goals is to advocate for people with aphasia during Aphasia Awareness Month by increasing awareness of aphasia, increasing programming for aphasia, and helping the general public learn more about aphasia.”

The program has received positive responses and engagement from members. Unlike the traditional STAR Program, the program’s care partners aren’t directly involved with the program but have shared stories of outstanding results in their loved ones.

“Our care partners have reported an increase in morale, self-confidence, and sometimes self-esteem,” Corwin said. “They have reported members looking forward to coming each day, and some report increased language or communication. Even though that's not our only goal, we hope it's one of them.”

“One real example is a man who, when he first began our Summer Arts Program, was pretty disheveled, and the staff at his long-term care facility reported that they had difficulty getting him up and getting him ready to come each morning,” Corwin said. “After day two, they reported he got himself up, he got himself groomed, and he got himself ready to board the van. We feel like it's because he came and he got to be around people who understand the condition of aphasia and the challenges that it brings. They accepted him for who he was, allowing him to renegotiate his identity as a person with aphasia and connect with others socially.”

Corwin says the program provides valuable experience to the SLP and OT students, who are given the opportunity to work with people living with aphasia beyond their immediate stay in the hospital or an inpatient rehabilitation unit. The program serves people who experienced their stroke several months or years ago and still experience physical and communication challenges despite many having already depleted their Medicare or insurance funds.

“These are people that our system hasn’t finished serving or should not have finished serving because they still have needs,” Corwin says. “This program provides our students with true insight into what it's like to live post-stroke, to live with aphasia, and to do it in a successful, positive way. It prepares our OT and SLP students well as they go into their internships with hospitals, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, and outpatient rehabilitation centers.”

“It reminds our students that if we're doing our job right, we should constantly be battling the risk of social isolation in these folks and allowing them the opportunity to converse and commune with others.”